It Really Is That Simple

 t isn’t hard. It’s really quite simple. God is real. God is universal. Grace is universal. God loves everyone. No exceptions. Not one. There is no hell. God condemns no one. All killing is wrong including when it’s done by a government in a prison or in a war. No law or governmental order, be it from a legal system or a military, can make killing anything but sin. Yes, society has the right and even the duty to protect itself from dangerous individuals. That does not mean it has the right to kill anyone. Everyone is equal. Absolutely everyone. No exceptions. Not one. Ever. God is love. Period. Love beyond our understanding, but infinitely more loving than we are not less. All morality is grounded in love. Not in rules. Not in judgment. Not in condemnation. Not condemnation of anyone ever. Love is all that makes life worth living. Not wealth. Not success. Not power. Love. Period. Always. No exceptions. The Bible isn’t divine. It is a collection of ancient documents that express understandings of ancient cultures that have next to nothing in common with ours except that both those cultures and ours are both human.. It is a collection of symbols and of stories, some of which are myths that point beyond themselves to God and some of which are nothing of the sort. God doesn’t want us to make everyone think like us. God wants us to spread love, peace, nonviolence, and justice as broadly around our country and around the world as we can. It really is that simple. 

And we keep insisting on making it all so much more complicated. And so much more less attractive. We make God a judge and condemner rather than a universal lover, and we think God calls us to be judged and condemners too. We make morality be about rigid rules rather than about love. We justify human beings killing other human beings in a myriad of circumstances. We condemn a wide variety of people for being who they are. We cite the Great Commandment and say it is our duty to convert everyone to our version of Christianity. We even say it is moral for us to use deception, coercion, and even violence to do it. We call people sinners simply for being who God made them to be. We don’t enact love in our public policies. Rather, we institutionalize violence and a preference for the rich rather than a preference for the poor. We won’t live with something as simple as God is love and God’s love determines everything. Yet it really is that simple. Period. 

Peace on Earth, Goodwill Toward All

 

Peace on Earth, Goodwill Toward All

For

Northshore UCC, Woodinville, WA

December 22, 2024

 

Scripture: Luke 1:46-55

 

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

 

Have any of you been feeling much peace lately? I have to tell you, I haven’t. I think that’s partly because though I’ve been retired for nearly seven years, I haven’t really adjusted to it yet. I still spend a fair amount of time fussing about what I’m supposed to be doing, which, it usually turns out, isn’t much. I often feel my soul ill at ease. Perhaps some of you feel your souls ill at ease too. The results of this year’s presidential and congressional elections are another reason for my spiritual unease. I don’t know how all of you feel about that result, but I’ll tell you that it hardly brings me peace. It brings me more worry, fear even, than it does peace. The news of this country and of this world is so bad that I watch a whole lot less TV news than I used to, and I don’t read much news online or anywhere else either. The news just disturbs me too much. So for me, and perhaps for some of you, peace is a hard thing to come by these days.

Yet we are in the season of Advent, and Christmas is just three days away. It has struck me this year how many Christmas carols speak of peace. The lyrics of the carol “It Came upon the Midnight Clear” include the line: “When peace shall over all the earth its ancient splendors fling.” The Huron carol “’Twas in the Moon of Wintertime” refers to “the radiant Child who brings you beauty, peace so mild.” The carol “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” says that the angels sing of “peace on earth and mercy mild” and of “God and sinners reconciled.” Another of my favorite carols, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” ends every verse with the phrase “Of peace on earth, goodwill toward men.” It certainly seems that the birth of the Messiah that we are about to celebrate once more has something to do with peace.

OK. But what is peace, exactly? It seems we must know what peace is, or at least is supposed to be, if we are to understand the peace that is somehow connected with Christmas. Dictionary definitions are of some help here. They say that peace is: The state of absence of disturbance. It is a state of tranquility or quiet, of freedom from disturbance, and from war and violence. It is also the state of not being interrupted by annoying things.

OK. Fair enough, but a Bible dictionary I use approaches the meaning of peace a bit differently. It says that in the Old Testament the word translated as peace is from the word shalom, which means “wholeness, or well-being.” This source says that the word “peace” means much the same thing in the New Testament as it does in the Old. So I think that we, as Christians, need to ask: How is the birth of Jesus Christ associated with, or how does it bring us, peace that is both freedom from war and destruction and from a sense of wholeness or well-being?

And I think we can get some answers to those questions from the scripture we heard this morning. It’s called The Magnificat, from its first words in Latin: “Magnificat anima mea Dominum,” “my soul magnifies the Lord.” In her magnificent hymn, for that’s surely what the Magnificat is, Mary does a couple of things. She first says that God has “looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.” It is, I think, important here that Mary refers to her own “lowliness.” What does that mean? It means, I think, that, by the standards of the world, Mary was essentially nobody. Yes, she may have been personally virtuous, but she wasn’t rich. She was married to a carpenter in a backwater part of a backwater province of the Roman Empire. She had no power. She had no authority. She was no one the world would take any notice of.

Yet God chose her to be the Theotokos, the Mother of God, as the Christian tradition has called her since a couple of ecumenical councils in the fifth century CE. God chose this young woman, probably  a very young woman by our standards, for the most sacred task God had ever given to anyone. God chose her, out of all of the women in the world, to do nothing less than bring the Messiah, the Christ, into the world.

Now, some of us have on occasion felt a divine call of one sort or another, but I doubt that any of us has been called to a task as holy as giving birth to the Son of God. God chose someone who was no one for that sacred task. And if God was so intimately present with the lowly Mary, don’t you think that God is with each one of us too? With every one of you? Even with me? I do. My favorite verse in the Bible, Romans 8:39, says that nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God. Mary’s lowliness didn’t separate her from the love of God. Our lowliness, whatever our individual lowliness may be, can’t separate us from the love of God either.

And I think that God’s unfailing, unshakable, unconditional presence with each and every one of us as love is where we can actually find peace in our troubled lives and in this very, very troubled world. God, after all, is the ultimate power behind the universe, behind everything that is. God is the only reality in all creation that represents eternal, universal peace. God’s peace is always available to us if we’ll just open ourselves to it and let God fill our souls with it. The peace I find, and about the only peace I can find, comes from my deep conviction that ultimately everything will be all right because—God. Because in the end, everything both begins and ends with God. Mary knew God’s love. So do I, as unworthy of it as I believe myself to be. God looked with favor on Mary’s lowliness. I know that God looks with favor on my lowliness too. And I know that God looks with favor on each and every one of you. Therein lies, for me at least, the only meaningful source of peace.

Now, an awful lot of the world’s lack of peace results from the gross imbalance of wealth and power that characterizes our country and a great many countries the earth around. The people of the world, more so in some countries and perhaps less so in others, are divided into the haves and the have nots. Between the rich and the poor. Between those with power and those who lack power. Between those who are heard and those who are never heard. Those divisions create tensions within societies. They produce stress in the lives of the have nots, of those without power, of those who are never heard, stress that robs most of them of inner peace.

Sometimes those divisions erupt into violence. Into civil war. Into terrorism. Frankly, folks, the pervasive presence of violence in our world appalls me and puzzles me. How did it ever get to be OK for some humans to kill other humans, be that in criminal acts or in war? More particularly, how did it ever get OK for Christians, who claim to follow the greatest prophet of nonviolence the world has ever known, to kill anyone? Ever. Because, folks, it just isn’t OK, but Christians have always been every bit as violent as other people if not even more violent.

May’s Magnificat gives us hope for peace in this world of division, oppression, and violence. In English translation, she speaks in the past tense. She says “God has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” I’ve always had trouble with the past tense here, though I understand that these words are in a different tense in the original Greek that means something more like these are things God is doing, has always done, and always will do.

I understand Mary’s words to give us God’s dream for the world. God’s dream of how the world should be; and, more importantly, how one day the world actually will be. Therein lies a hope for peace. The oppressions and injustices that so characterize the world are not how God wants the world to be. I don’t know why the world doesn’t conform to God’s dream of justice, though I sure know that it doesn’t. I can, however, take hope from Mary’s confession that some day the world will conform to that dream. That one day the world will be a place of peace because it will have overcome the causes of its present violence.

So today, as we think about peace, we can take hope. We can take hope for our spirits and our world. We can take hope from Mary’s words in the Magnificat. Even more than that, we can find hope for peace in what we’re waiting for in this Advent season. In the coming birth of Jesus Christ, our Messiah, in the traditional language of our Christian tradition, our Savior. For it isn’t really with Mary that our hope for peace lies. It is, rather, with Jesus, the one with whom Mary was pregnant when she spoke the Magnificat.

The day when we especially celebrate his birth is nearly here. Three more days is all. Yes, for most children, Christmas is all about presents; and in a sense it is about presents, or rather, a present, for adult Christians too. It’s not about the presents the magi gave baby Jesus. That’s what we celebrate on Epiphany not on Christmas. It’s not about the presents that may be under our Christmas tree at home. It is, rather, about the one great gift that God gave us when Jesus was born.

What is that gift? The Gospel of Matthew says what it is in one word. Matthew, citing Isaiah, calls Jesus “Emmanuel,” and that means “God with us.” On Christmas we celebrate the ultimate foundation of our peace. We celebrate God coming to us as one of us, as irrational and impossible to believe as that may be. Yet Christmas can renew and strengthen our trust that that is who Jesus was and is: God With Us. And therein lies our peace. For me, therein lies our only possible hope for peace. The only possible ground of peace. Peace for my soul. Eventually, though certainly not while I’m alive, peace in my world, which of course isn’t my world at all but is God’s world.

So on Christmas Eve, as we sing Silent Night, that most peaceful of all Christmas carols, let’s remember what and who we are celebrating. Let us cling to baby Jesus as God’s great gift to us, a gift in may ways but perhaps most importantly, a gift of peace. May it be so. Amen.

 

Giving Prayer:

Loving and gracious God, in three days we will celebrate the coming of your greatest gift to us, the gift of your Son Jesus the Christ. We have nothing we can return to you that is in any way comparable to your divine gift to us. Yet today we return a small portion of the blessings we have received. May they, and we, go out into the world to do the sacred work of building your realm of peace and justice on your good earth. Amen.

 

Benediction

Friends, the holy day is almost here. Two evenings from today, on Christmas Eve, in this church and in a great many churches, we will hear the Christmas stories and sing the old, familiar carols. I pray that for you, and for me, that it will be a night of peace and hope. For Jesus Christ is our peace. For Jesus Christ is our hope. So as you go on your way, may the One whose birth we await go with you. May he go before you to show you the way, behind you to encourage you, beside you to befriend you, above you to watch over, and within you give you peace this day, and forever more. Amen.

The Greatest Blessing

 

The Greatest Blessing

For

Northshore United Church of Christ

Woodinville, Washington

Dec. 22, 2024

 

Scripture: Luke 1:46-55

 

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

 

It’s almost here, isn’t it. Christmas I mean. It’s something most American Christians look forward to all year. We emphasize its importance by putting a whole season of the church year in front of it, namely, Advent. I suppose I don’t look forward to Christmas as an adult the way I did when I was a kid. I’d await Christmas mostly with impatience. It always felt like Christmas was never going to come. Now, my eagerness for Christmas actually to come wasn’t grounded in any religious faith. Sure. We went to church regularly. We’d put up a Christmas tree and otherwise decorate the house for the Christmas season, never mind that in the church calendar the season of Christmas doesn’t start until December 25. Sometimes we’d put a few colored lights along the roofline of the house. We’d receive, and my parents would send out, Christmas cards. We’d do all of that before Christmas, and it all made Christmas feel like a really big deal.

Though, of course, what actually made Christmas a really big deal for me when I was a kid wasn’t the birth of Jesus, it was presents. Loot. Getting and opening gifts on Christmas morning. I suspect it’s that way with essentially all kids whose families celebrate Christmas in the traditional way, traditional for our culture anyway if not actually for the entire church universal. I remember coming out into the living room and seeing all the presents under the tree that weren’t there the night before. It was the best morning of the year.

Now, in the Christian church, of course, that’s not what Christmas is about at all. It’s not what Advent is leading us to and preparing us for. Christmas is, of course, the celebration of the birth of Jesus, the one we call the Christ and some of us still call our Lord. Advent really is supposed to be a time of our preparing to welcome him into the world and into our lives once again. As part of the way Advent does that, each Sunday of Advent has a theme. The themes of the first three Sundays of Advent are Peace, Joy, and Hope. Today is the fourth Sunday of Advent, and its theme is Love. Advent tells us that Christmas really is about all four of those themes. And since today’s theme is Love, let’s look briefly about what that might mean in the context of Christmas.

We see what it means, I think, in the opening verses of the scripture we just heard. That scripture is called “the Magnificat” from its first words in Latin: “Magnificat anima mea Dominum.” I find the Magnificat to be one of the most powerful of all biblical passages. In it Mary, pregnant with Jesus, acts the prophet, proclaiming God’s justice to the world. I could, I suppose, speak to you about God bringing the powerful down from their thrones and sending the rich away hungry, which is what Mary says God does. I could do that, but I’m not going to. I want to talk to you instead about how the opening lines of the Magnificat teach about what God’s love really is.

We all know the context of the Magnificat. A young woman who is a virgin has accepted God’s invitation to her to become the mother of the long-anticipated Messiah. She has not had marital relations with her husband Joseph, but she is pregnant with Jesus in a nonsexual way through the Holy Spirit. She has gone to visit her relative Elizabeth, who is pregnant with one who would become John the Baptist. Elizabeth has said that Mary is “blessed among women” and has called the child Mary is carrying her “Lord.” Mary responds with the Magnificat.

Now, who was this Mary, whom God as chosen to bring God’s Son into the world? To put it simply, she is nobody. Yes, she may have been perfectly virtuous, upright person; but, to the world, she was nobody. She was almost certainly a very young woman. Some scholars say she was probably around 14 years old. She was from Nazareth of Galilee. Nazareth of Galilee was on the far edge of nowhere. It was a tiny, obscure town in a backwater part of a backwater province of the Roman Empire. She was betrothed to a man, Joseph, who was a carpenter, a worthy profession to be sure but hardly one to bring a person to much public attention. To her world, Mary was just another young woman destined to become the wife of an obscure, poor man and to bear his children. There is, of course, nothing wrong with bearing children even if we do it in poverty, but in the eyes of the world, Mary was nobody.

And she’s the one God chose to bring Jesus Christ into the world. In the Magnificat, Mary herself refers to her “lowliness.” She says that God has “looked with favor” on her lowliness and has done great things for her. It is precisely one who the world surely would have held to be of no account whom God chose to be the Mother of God, as the Christian tradition has long called her.

Now, the Advent theme for today is “Love.” Do these lines from Mary’s Magnificat tell us anything about love? Well, yes. I think they do. See, God could have chosen some wealthy woman from Jerusalem who was married to some man of high standing and regard in the community to bear God’s Son. God could even have chosen a Roman not a Jew for that divine work. That’s pretty much what the world would have expected God to do, right?

But that’s not what God did. Rather, God turned to a person of low estate and lifted her up to become the Mater Dei, the Mother of God. God considered this young woman of no earthly account to be worthy of bearing God’s Son. Clearly, while we confess that God loves all people, in this instance God loved the nobody named Mary more than God loved the wealthy and powerful of the world.

She says her souls magnifies the Lord, and I suppose her soul did. But it is surely also true that God magnified Mary. God lifted her out of obscurity, for a time at least. God made her become one of the central figures of the foundational Christian story. We Protestants don’t pray to her the way Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians do, but that doesn’t mean that she means nothing to us. For us as much as for those other Christians, Mary is indeed the Mother of God.

God magnified Mary. That means many things, but it is surely grounded in God’s love for her. It is grounded in God’s respect for her. For God, Mary’s poverty and obscurity weren’t impediments to God choosing her for the sacred work of bearing God’s Son. Rather, I think we must understand that her poverty and obscurity were big parts of the reason why God chose her rather than someone of higher economic and social standing for that divine task. In choosing such an obscure if virtuous person for the sacred task God was asking of her, God was showing us that God prefers the lowly to the big shots. Or at least, God was telling us not to consider the big shots as better than ordinary, poor, unremarkable people. God was showing us how God’s love works in action.

That love became incarnate when Jesus was born. God showed us God’s love when God chose Mary. Jesus showed us God’s love in everything he said and did. And in everything he said and did, Jesus lifted up the poor and brought down the rich, the powerful, the haughty, the arrogant, the overly self-concerned and self-important. God and Jesus Christ call us to do the same.

And it doesn’t make much sense, does it. At least, it makes no sense when viewed from the way the world most commonly views things. Jesus may have said blessed are the poor, but the world pretty much blesses the rich not the poor, doesn’t it. Jesus may have said blessed are the meek, but the world pretty much blesses the strong and powerful not the meek, doesn’t it. Jesus may have said it would harder for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, but the world gives the rich access to things the poor can hardly even dream of, doesn’t it. Things like lavash housing and luxury cars. Expensive, tailor-made clothes and fine cuisine. Even more modest things like safe, warm housing and enough food, modest as it may be, to keep from starving. No, God may have what I told you about the last time I was here, namely, a preferential option for the poor. The powers of the world definitely have a preferential option for the rich.

We know that in the years ahead there are going to ever more people in this country who are poor, who lack things like adequate heath insurance; for it seems that the powers that be are intent on making sure they don’t have it. Who lack things like personal safety and secure employment, for the powers that be seem to be intent on making sure they don’t have those either. People who do not have personal autonomy and control of their own bodies, for the powers that be seem intent on making sure people, especially women, don’t have those either. You are of course free to disagree with me, but, frankly, the years ahead look to me like they are going to be difficult at best for those who, like Mary of Nazareth, God chooses in God’s love here on earth.

We are about to celebrate the incarnation of that kind of divine love in Jesus Christ. He was born dirt poor. Angels announced his birth to shepherds who were dirt poor. Yes, God loves everyone; but the wealthy and powerful don’t need us to provide what they need to live and to live with simply human dignity. The ones Jesus called “the least of these” do need us, most of whom, myself included, are so very, very privileged. They’ve always needed our care and our love. They’re going to need it even more in the years ahead.

So, in three days, as we celebrate the birth of Jesus, let’s remember who God chose to be his mother. A virtuous but young, powerless, poor woman of no worldly account. A young woman vulnerable to the vicissitudes of a life of powerless poverty. Let us always remember that people more or less like Mary, even if they are considerably less virtuous than she was, are the ones God loves the most. They’re the ones God calls us to love the most. May our faith in the Savior whose birth we are about to celebrate give us the vision, the wisdom, the strength, and the courage to respond to God’s love with love, love especially for people like Mary. May it be so. Amen.

I'm Depressed

 This evening I’m feeling a lot of negativity, and I'm feeling it for a couple of reasons. First, there truly is no way to see the election of Donald Trump as president and the Republicans as in control of Congress as other than a total disaster. That that son-of-a-bitch will be president, and that his ass lickers control Congress, really does depress me.  

Then there's the way that literalism may well may have already have destroyed Christianity depresses me, if anything, it depresses me even more than Donald Trump and his cult of personality called the Republican Party do, for faith is more important and more powerful than politics. Even in a Facebook group supposedly for progressive Christianity, people post moronic questions that are grounded in biblical literalism. So few people get it. Literalism has a stranglehold on Christianity that may already have squeezed all of the life out of it. Christian literalism is utterly untenable bullshit, and there just is no getting around that truth. And only a handful of people get it. It is becoming clearer and clearer to me that it is possible if not likely that not enough people are going to get it to save the faith from the extinction it faces. The loss of the Christian system of symbols and myths will impoverish humanity, because as long as there is a hope of reforming the faith away from literalism, Christianity has the potential to save the world. Not, of course, by forcing everyone to become Christian. That is something of which God would never approve. But by spreading Jesus’ gospel of love, justice, and peace for everyone Christian or not. By building the realm of God on earth, by spreading nonviolence, political, economic and social justice, inclusiveness, and universal salvation without clobbering people over the head with Christian dogma. Will that ever happen? I have no way of knowing. I’m sure I won’t live long enough to see whether it happens or not. The way nations, including first of all mine, fall for fascist authoritarianism and the lies in which it is always grounded pretty much kills any hope I might otherwise feel.  

I need to say this again. I just can’t understand how this country could do it. I mean, there are no secrets about Donald Trump. His 34 felony convictions are public knowledge. So is the civil case he lost about sexual assault. So is his personal immorality. So is his constant lying. So is the fact that he cares only about and for himself and his billionaire backers to the extent that they give him money and lick his ass. To the extent that they want to destroy this country as much as he does, which far too many of them are perfectly willing to do to preserve their wealth, wealth most of them use only for themselves not for the betterment of real people. Not to solve the world’s myriad, horrific problems. So is the undeniable truth that he incited an insurrectionist mob to attack the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an effort to subvert both the Constitution and the will of the people by staying in power though he lost the 2020 presidential election fair and square.  

So I truly don’t get it. What is there not to see about this asshole? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. He doesn’t even try much to hide what a despicable person he is personally. He lays his horrific political and economic plans out in plain view for everyone to see. And a majority of the American people put him back in the White House, which is way beyond my ability to understand. So I get depressed, and I guess actually knowing how it happened wouldn’t ease my depression. It might even make it worse. So I live depressed, and I don’t see a damned thing I can do about it. Shit! 

What Shakes My Faith

This is an entry I just put in my personal journal:

 If there is one thing that shakes my faith in God, it is the suffering and death of children. That children suffer and die too soon is just wrong. Morally wrong. It shouldn't happen, but, of course, it does. And I don’t get it. Children aren’t perfect of course. They are, after all, human. But they’re innocent. No child deserves to have cancer especially if the die of it. No child deserves to have her mother killed by invading Israelis, or by anyone else for that matter.  No child deserves to be killed by a shooter in a school or by the Israeli Defense Forces killing thousands of innocent people in Gaza. It’s just so wrong. It’s just so indefensible. Yet it happens to at least thousands of kids every day. And I just don’t get it. I’ll never get it. I can come up with theological reasons why God doesn’t stop it, but they’re all bullshit. That God doesn’t stop it is inexcusable. Sorry, God, but it just is. Of that I am deeply certain, and I always will be. Maybe I’m like the Jews in the Nazi death camps. They would try God for the crime of not stopping the Holocaust, find God guilty, then go to worship. Their doing so makes no sense, but then faith makes no sense, which, actually, is one of its great virtues. So I live with it. I don’t understand it, but I live with it. What choice do I have? What choice does anyone have? 

What Do We Do Now?

                                                                What Do We Do Now? 

December 14, 2024 

On January 20, 2025, our national nightmare will begin. Many of us have feared it for a long time now, for its contours and content have long been obvious to anyone with an open mind. My country, the United States of America, has elected as its president a man who is an adulterer, a compulsive liar, and a fraud who has thirty-four felony convictions on his record. It has put American fascism in charge of our national government.  Donald Trump and his legion of other American fascists do not believe in democracy. They do not believe in equal civil rights, especially not for women. They do not believe in the equal human dignity and autonomy of all people, especially not of women and anyone with a minority sexual orientation or identity. Trump and his minions are preparing to deport millions of decent, honest people who are only here seeking a better life for themselves and their families. Hitler’s first intention with regard to Europe’s Jews wasn’t to kill them all, it was to deport them all. Only when it turned out that he couldn’t do that did he begin his mass extermination campaign. When deporting all the people Trump wants to deport proves to be logistically impossible, which it surely will, will Trump and his American fascists set out to murder all the people they wanted to deport but couldn’t? I like to think they aren’t that bad, but time will tell. 

Those of us who remain committed to democracy, civil rights, and the equal dignity and autonomy of all people face a challenge no one committed to those supposedly American values has ever faced before. I have struggled long and hard with the question of what to do in response to Trump and his American fascism. I have heard various proposed answers to that question. A colleague of mine says be civil and talk and listen to those who support the fascists. Others say withdraw. Focus on what you can control and forget about what you can’t. Pay attention to your spirituality not your politics. Others say support the ACLU and be prepared to fight fascism in the courts. I suppose there are others who say, in effect, go the mattresses and fight fascism with violence.  

Except for a resort to violence, all of these responses have their virtues, though I don’t think listening and talking to Trump’s rabid supporters will so any good. Withdrawing and ignoring the destruction Trump will wreak on this country has its appeal, and attending to one’s spirituality is always a good and constructive thing to do. I have given a little bit of money to the ACLU. Yet none of those responses strikes me as adequate. I keep asking myself: In 1933, should Germans have been gently talking and listening to Nazis? No! Should they have withdrawn into themselves and their spirituality and ignored the horror Hitler and his murderous supporters were inflicting on their country? No! Was there any real hope of relief from the courts, all which the Nazis effectively controlled? No! Should we do what Dietrich Bonhoeffer did and join a conspiracy to commit murder despite our commitment to Christian nonviolence? No!  

So here’s where I believe we stand today. There isn’t a damned thing we can do to stop Trump and his gang from inflicting immense harm on this country and especially on the environment and the vulnerable people among us. That harm is going to happen. We have two decent responses available to us, though neither of them will prevent the damage the Trump Republicans are hellbent on causing. They are: 

First, care for those Trump hurts as best we can. Provide financial aid for those whom Trump forces into abject poverty, and there may well be millions of them. Help pay for medical care for those who will lose their health insurance as the Republicans do all they can to destroy the Affordable Care Act, and there will be millions of them too. Provide refuge and emotional and spiritual support to transgender people and other sexual minorities as the Trumpists conduct a propaganda campaign promoting hatred and violence against them and as they try to remove the legal protections their rights have today, such as they are. Trump’s American fascism will result in vastly increased demands on our country’s charitable institutions. We can and must support those institutions as best we can both with money and with our presence and activity. 

Second, we can and we must keep speaking out. We can and must refuse to compromise with evil. I’m old. My gifts, such as I have them, have to do with writing not with more physical activities such as engaging in public protests. I will continue to write, not that much of anyone reads what I read. I will continue to preach Jesus’ gospel of justice and peace every chance I get, though those chances are few and far between. I will speak out as forcefully as I can against Trump’s American fascism if I ever get the chance, though it’s unlikely that I ever will have such a chance of any significance. 

It’s not much. It won’t make any difference, but here’s the thing. In Germany today, the Germans who opposed Hitler, indeed, those who tried to kill him, are national heroes. They changed nothing, but they show that there were Germans who didn’t drink the Nazi Kool-Aid. There were Germans who knew better, who knew how evil Hitler and the Nazis were. Germans today cannot undo the immeasurable harm they inflicted on innumerable people between 1933 and 1945, but they can take some solace in knowing that there were Germans who resisted, however ineffectively. 

That may be the best we can do. Leave a record for history that shows that not all Americans drank Trump’s poisoned brew. To leave a record from which history will be able to see that, despite the fact that the country made the American fascist Donald Trump president twice, there were also decent, moral, caring Americans who, as ineffective as they were bound to be in the face of today’s fascist wave, at least did something to resist. So history will be able to see that America’s claimed virtues of freedom, democracy, and civil rights were not completely lost.  

Yes, I know. It’s not much. And maybe it seems to matter to me because I’m a professionally trained historian. The Soviets had Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov. The Germans had Bonhoeffer and von Stauffenberg, as flawed as their opposition was because it was or tried to be violent. Who will we have? The ACLU and other civil rights organizations I suppose. Some Democratic politicians who may continue to resist. Some but, sadly, by no means all religious leaders of various faiths who continue to speak out. Some, perhaps even many, lone voices like mine crying out in the wilderness. Those of us who continue to resist may be able to mitigate the harm the Trump administration will work to inflict on us, but we won’t be able to stop them from inflicting it.  

The most important thing that we can do now is resist. Resist nonviolently, but resist. However we can. As often as we can. We can refuse to accept Trump’s lies as truth though all, or at least many of us, do accept them. We can refuse to have cordial relations with people who support and advocate fascistic evil, and there are a great many Americans doing that today. We can hold onto hope, thin as it may be, that one day this country will wake up to its error in entrusting our fate to Trump and his American fascists and get back on track to making this a better country not a substantially worse one as Trump will do. No. It’s not much. It won’t change much if it changes anything at all. It is, however, what we can do; so let’s do it.